Rob McElhenney’s Challenge Has No Winners—But Still Awards a Prize

Rob gave the Fandom a challenge on Thursday: work out what the episode on the board is and win $100, and he gave us exactly twenty-four hours to do so. 

Unfortunately, at 5pm on Friday he announced “no one got anywhere close,” which means we’ll have to wait a couple more months to find out how Charlie Day’s cryptic notes end up being the season finale (!!news). 

So that should have been the end of that. No one got close, ah well, put on your clown noses if you were convinced you’d cracked it and take another look at Charlie’s board if you’re really that obsessed. But not me because 1) I’m stubborn with a bit of an inflated ego when it comes to knowing Sunny (even the shit that hasn’t hit our eyes yet) and 2) He tweeted this Friday evening while I was a shot of tequila and a few beers deep on an empty stomach. 

Now I’m not saying I’m convinced my friends and I got it right regardless of what Rob claims, but my drunk brain was definitely saying that. So I tweeted a reply. And I drank some more and I tweeted my thoughts, and I tweeted I think he’s lying, and I continued to drink while I tweeted some more thoughts, directly to Rob this time, and then an hour passed and I tweeted “release the s16 scripts anyway idk” and then I drank some more. And then Rob McElhenney quoted me.  

But before I go any further, let’s back up so I can explain why I drunk tweeted about a release of the Season 16 scripts in the midst of this.  

See, Thursday night when I sat down to crack the Season 17 episode, I collaborated with some friends who are just as insane about this show as I am. We spent two hours on the phone, and then another couple hours via text and Notes app to put everything together and come up with what we were pretty certain was the episode Charlie and Rob were writing. Pulling directly from Charlie’s white board, our notes ended up as follows:

1. 
   [REDACTED] with Frank
2. Clips of Frank [REDACTED] (meeting Girls? Investors?) 
   
3. Talks __ too OLD
4. Cock chews ages/info 
5. Sam Frank DATE
6. In stocio meets [REDACTED]
7. Have two of//tour visit paddy’s 
8. Dennis/Dee Sam
9. Mac/Charlie Sam
10. F gang most/meets/moment ch-
11. Dennis and Dee w/ Chew
12. Mac and Charlie w/ Chew
13. Taking last gang 
14. Dennis brings Charlie’s
15. Taking [REDACTED] Frank Begs?
16. Frank dumps Sam because she doesn’t put out 
17. F b,ing Chew / test goes wrong 
18. To stocio eruption/explanation  
19. Frank to get ___  to make up 
20. In [REDACTED] 

Which, I’ll admit, kinda seems like nonsense typed out instead of written in Charlie’s handwriting, but hear us out here, there is a way to approach this:

Drawing from connections between certain words and ideas, there’s a pretty clear thread of Frank dating a woman named Sam, with the Gang interspersed in pairings (Dennis & Dee and Charlie & Mac), and something or someone called “Chew”. Our first thought was that, given the all caps “OLD” lead in, perhaps the Gang has told Frank he’s too old to be dating and he tries to prove otherwise by dating two people at once, hence the Gang with Sam and then the Gang with Chew. And while that seemed like a solid idea, there was no real Sunny aspect we could pull from that. Aside from “Frank is old,” what’s the spoof, where’s the satirical element, what are they ripping on? There has to be something in here we’re missing…

While we ruminated on what the overall joke could be, the word “Chew” kept sticking out to us. It appears over and over, and there’s a parallel of Chew to Sam, which may mean it’s two people… but there’s differences in how Charlie Day writes the Chew parts to the Sam parts (i.e. having “w/” following M+C for Chew but not Sam), so perhaps it’s not a person but a thing. And in considering that, I threw out a joke, “Hey what if this whole episode is actually just a sponsor for BlueChew because they miss the Podcast advertisers,” and no one laughed. I clarified that BlueChew is a viagra pill just like Hims, a viagra pill they used to have as a sponsor on The Always Sunny Podcast, and while having to explain your joke is never going to make someone retroactively laugh, the funny thing is it actually led us to what the Sunny plot here could be. Maybe it is just that. A shitpost (in part) on themselves. 

Last season Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab was a spoof on the fact that Rob, Charlie, and Glenn, themselves, had recently stepped into the market of celebrity liquors. Since the whiteboard episode in question is being written by Rob and Charlie (and probably Glenn), the chance that it’s full of jokes on themselves is fairly high, and what better to rip on than the fact that 1) they advertised a viagra product on their (now dead) Podcast and 2) they’re all getting old. 

With the word “Cock” ahead of the first instance of “Chew” following the all-caps OLD being followed by Frank on a DATE, the connections began to flow:

• Sam = woman Frank is dating
• Cock Chew = BlueChew/viagra/boner pill
• Gang meets Sam and then gets involved with the Chew (pairings Dennis&Dee/Mac&Charlie have different motivations...)
• Dennis goes off with Charlie’s 
• Frank can’t test the product because Sam won’t put out
• Eruption/Climax - pills go wrong ?

And the idea basically wrote itself:

"Struggling with erectile dysfunction in his old age, Frank gets the Gang involved in a new product to enhance his sex life.”

Locked in, we tweeted our guess(es) to Rob, and as it was a group effort (and because we really didn’t care about making $100 here, this is all for the love of the game), I followed up on our submission with the following reply:

Which takes us back to the beginning of this story, explaining that one final drunk tweet in all of this, resulting in Rob’s quote tweet:

Yes, the Dropbox contains all of the Season 16 scripts (mostly Production Drafts!), which you can read here. 

So, a prize was awarded as a result of this little game, though not exactly directly. But for Rob to understand what my tweet meant means he very likely saw our submission and the reply (and maybe a few of my other drunk tweets, sorry Rob), and offered up the scripts based on that knowledge, giving us exactly what we asked for in the case in which our guess was correct. Which now begs the question: does that… in a way…perhaps somewhat…say something about our guess? Or was this just done purely out of the goodness of his heart, a consolation prize? (Or due to my persistent badgering? Or the fact that he saw I saw drunk at a bar and thought it would be funny to do it now?)

Only time can truly tell, but I do think it’ll be a shame if they never do an episode of Sunny that spoofs on their prior Podcast advertisers…especially one so pertinent to former Sunny dialogue.

But one thing is for certain, it sure will be fun to come back to Charlie Day’s whiteboard once the episode airs! (Or even once we get the synopsis…or even the Season 17 summary…)

Go enjoy those Season 16 scripts!!

-Seth